Friday afternoon, Allan, Derek and I loaded up Allan’s truck, and headed for the West Sussex show. We put together a joint N-club modular circuit with the West Sussex boys. The actual layout went together very well on the Friday evening, but we had to drop two modules as the room was slightly smaller than expected. A certain amount of fiddling was needed with the wiring, as the WSNG use a different connection arrangement from us at ESNG. Still, by the time the show opened at 10am on Saturday, all was working reasonably well, and continued to do so for the two days. On the Saturday morning, we even had time for a full English breakfast before the show.

On display was ERIC, having a Southern Region theme, courtesy of Derek. We’ll use the same locomotives for Stuttgart, to save Derek putting them all away.

Martin Micklewright’s Lowater Basin got favourable comments, with its detail and working lighting. Here we see Thomas passing on the main line….

The new West Sussex fiddleyard is an impressive beast, offering 11 tracks feeding up to five tracks in or out.

The WSNG modules on show gave additional ideas as to what can be built in a small space. The second one illustrated was running on DCC, and on the Sunday we were serenaded by a brand new Farish Class 40 with full sound on board. More impressive was the inertia built into the locomotive, that took over a circuit of the layout to come to a halt when the power was cut – and could be heard running down the gears.

Elsewhere ESNG members were well represented by Sean’s Forrestone (look out for this little layout in Model Rail in the coming months)…..

And by Martin’s St Elizabeth Street (aided and abetted by Neil)….

Pick of the other ‘N’ gauge layouts was probably Kayreuth, set somewhere in Germany, on the Ruhr. Lots of interesting detail, and there’s always a train moving in a cityscape.